


Elegance

by cmshaw



Category: Beauty and the Beast (Fairy Tale)
Genre: Gen, Steampunk, Yuletide
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2009-12-24
Updated: 2009-12-24
Packaged: 2017-10-05 05:54:58
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 712
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/38466
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cmshaw/pseuds/cmshaw
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"I wish you wouldn't call it the Beast," she said.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Elegance

**Author's Note:**

  * For [alice](https://archiveofourown.org/users/alice/gifts).



> Many thanks to lightgetsin, the eleventh hour beta who made this make sense.

They plucked at her sleeves and kerchief curiously, her sisters. "Is this all you had to wear, for the Beast?" they said. "Is this all you were given?"

Ellie scowled at them. "I wish you wouldn't call it the Beast," she said. "Is there any coffee left?"

"Sarah has made new improvements," Annie said. "You must try it now!"

"You call it the Beast," Mathilda said.

"Yes, but I say it with love," she said to Mathilda, and "Well, hand over a cup, then," to Annie.

"I see you didn't practice any fine manners with your _Beast_," Ethel said.

"Oh, come now," Annie said over her shoulder. "One doesn't tap a lady engineer's shoulder and remind her to hold out her pinky finger." There was an almighty whoosh of steam as she manipulated a shining new lever beside the icebox. "Here you are, Ellie love," she said, pouring coffee and froth together into a pink china cup and presenting cup and saucer with a flourish.

"Thank you," Ellie said. She sipped cautiously, wary of Sarah's culinary experimentation, but this was delightful.

"Would you like to clean up a bit?" asked Mathilda.

Ellie shook her head. "I don't have much time. I'll just need to get back soon anyway."

"Oh no!" cried her sisters together.

"You've been working in the laboratory all week," Annie said mournfully.

"You're all over grease," said Ethel, "and did you burn your arm?"

"Oh, it's nothing," Ellie said, covering her elbow involuntarily. "Just a little accident." She looked around her at their shining faces, scrubbed clean of soot and oil as soon as it appeared, and at the stacks of newspapers in the kitchen that were as much penny dreadful as scientific marvel. This dormitory had been her home since she left for university and these girls her sisters, and she had missed them dreadfully when she had been called up to the laboratory at Woods-on-East Castle.

It had been Annie who had caused it, and she wondered now if Annie's frantic bonhomie -- far more than she or any of her sisters usually showed to Ellie -- was driven by something that might almost resemble guilt lurking in her breast. Annie had been trapped in the library by a snowstorm and, offered transport back to the dormitories in Dr. Rose's walking coach, nervously babbled on about her sister's research project instead of admitting her own failed experiments. She had escaped the walking coach at the entrance to the dormitories with orders that Dr. Rose would expect an assistant at her doorstep as soon as the paths were melted. Ellie sounded splendid, the professor had reportedly said; Annie would see to it that she understood the honor. And Ellie had understood it, and a great more besides. The next morning she had braided her hair back, strapped on a full toolbelt, and shouldered a collapsible snow shovel of her own design in case of drifts. This was the first time in a week she'd been back to the dormitory.

Now, she thought of Dr. Rose's importuning, her offers of grant money, side projects, the political support of a tenured professor if only Ellie would agree to remain as her full-time assistant. The work was wonderful -- the beautiful Beast growing in the pit of their laboratory cog by cog and steam-pipe by steam-pipe was going to revolutionize how the world ran -- and for once no one was rolling eyes at her for working on into the night, not just the night before examinations but every night, driven by her delight in the pieces of the Beast she assembled with Dr. Rose.

Last night, the two of them had meant to finish the assembling of the sixth major piston controller, something which would have allowed them to turn on the second engine this morning. Sometime in the deep night, though, when the furnace was thumping and sweat was beading on her forehead, Ellie had turned the left-handed coils around, stared into the depths of the Beast for a ten-cycle count as she turned the equations in her mind, and said hesitantly, "That's interesting."

"Yes," Ellie told her sisters, "I can't stay long at all. I'm needed back in the laboratory tonight. I've just come back for a couple of books I left."


End file.
